Juno of Taris

O
n Taris, we shave our heads.

No. That’s wrong. On Taris, we have our heads shaved for us.

It’s to remind us who we are. It’s to keep us all the same. It’s to take away the need to spend time on our appearance, so that we can concentrate on our survival. So they say. But when I ask how growing our hair would endanger our survival, people turn away from me. It’s called withdrawing.

So here we are, all five hundred of us, our heads shaved bald every week by a gentle old man called Nixie. We wear tunics of unbleached linen and we concentrate on our task of keeping our island home functioning.

To be fair, we need to work hard at surviving. Taris is the brainchild of a desperate twenty-first century world. Somebody had a bright idea: take an island in the world’s wildest, coldest ocean, sling an artificial dome around it, give it its own balmy climate, plant it with tropical plants, stock its sea with fish, and dump a few fowl, goats and rabbits on it. Add a bunch of carefully chosen people.

I am one of the descendants of those first carefully chosen people. Well, kind of. But more of that as I tell my story, and the best place to start is a school day when I was eleven years old. I was supposed to be doing maths, but my mind skittered off in another direction – to Outside. Why was I the only one who wanted to know what it was like now? Was it worse or better? I was sure things must have changed one way or the other over two hundred years; but I had learned not to speak of it.

Justa, our teacher, tapped my computer screen. ‘Concentrate please, Juno.’ She frowned at the pictograph I’d typed without thinking:
Outside
. ‘It’s a waste of energy thinking about Outside.’

She spoke gently, but Silvern sniggered and muttered, ‘Jump out the landing dock, why don’t you?’

Justa touched her shoulder. ‘When you are perfect, Silvern, you may laugh at other’s mistakes, but not until that day.’

I didn’t bother to send Silvern a look of triumph. I frowned at my computer and tried to attend to its voice yammering in my earphones and demanding answers. I keyed in a few pictographs and hoped Justa would think I was working. But my mind had seized on Silvern’s words – I couldn’t climb the mountain to the landing dock, and there would be nothing to see through the mist when I got there. But she’d planted in my head the idea of escape, of doing something different, of going somewhere I’d never gone before, and that was a nearly impossible thing to do on our small island.

I could swim out to the walls of our island. The thought of it made me shiver with excitement.

The recreation hour was the only time I’d be able to do it. If I hurried home from school and didn’t linger over lunch, I would have almost two hours before I had to be back to help with the manual chores we all did in the afternoons.

I would take the path that circles the mountain. Leave it at the highest point. Find a way through the rocks and scrubby bushes to the very end of the promontory because that was the closest point of land to the walls of the dome that protected us from the ravages of the outside world.

It would be a dangerous climb down the cliff but it would be necessary. If I swam from the end of the promontory it would be half as far as if I swam from the beach. Even so, it would be an exhausting swim. But if I was to touch the walls of our world it was the only way I could do it.

Justa tapped my screen again. ‘You should have finished this by now, Juno.’

I smiled, apologised and managed to do two calculations while she watched me. I didn’t look at Silvern.

But I was too excited to concentrate on trig problems – I was going on an adventure. I might pick up some hint of Outside, perhaps I’d be able to feel the huge waves of the Southern Ocean crashing against our walls. Would the walls feel cold – colder than anything I’d ever experienced? I shrugged. I didn’t know – all I knew was that I desperately wanted to find out.

Justa dismissed us for the day. I shut my computer down and followed the rest of my learning stratum from the room. I thought Justa might try to speak to me. She didn’t, but I felt her eyes on me as I left, dawdling, so that the other thirteen of my classmates were ahead of me.

Would I feel so hemmed in by my life on Taris if I had a real true friend? Like Silvern and Shallym for instance, ahead of me on the path: heads together, giggling over something I definitely didn’t want to know about. Stupid girls – just because they were nearly two years older than me they thought they were queens of the island.

I wouldn’t think of them. I needed to work out how I could escape from the eyes of those who loved me.

If only I could creep out at night when there would be no one around to see me, but not even I was foolhardy enough to attempt something so risky at night. It would have to be the recreation hour.

I arrived home five minutes before my parents. ‘Hello, dear girl,’ Mother said, smiling at me. ‘You’re early.’

I shrugged. ‘I ran all the way.’

Dad grinned. ‘You must have missed a lot of news on the way, in that case.’

I shook my head. ‘I heard that Oban hopes to be chosen to be the atmospherics apprentice. I heard that Arten said his first word today.’

Mother laughed. ‘I heard that too – he said “want”! Reda and Moss are mortified.’

I smiled too, but the truth was I didn’t care. It was driving me out of my mind, the smallnesses of our world. ‘I’m going walking during the recreation hour.’

My parents said nothing for a couple of heartbeats, then Mother sighed. ‘Very well, Juno. You have our permission.’

I hugged her, and then I hugged Dad. I was fortunate that they allowed me so much freedom. Silvern’s parents would not have allowed her to walk by herself during the recreation hour. There was no reason not to do it, no law, no rule – it was just that nobody ever did. If I had wanted to go swimming in the Bay of Clowns with everyone else, it wouldn’t cause gossip. But if somebody saw me walking alone around the mountain, I’d be the subject of gossip for days. And somebody was bound to see me.

‘Thank you.’ I set out the wooden platters on the table and filled a pitcher with water. Silently, I thanked them for not asking why I wanted to do such a wayward thing as walk by myself.

We sat down to our meal – at midday it was some variation on bread rolls filled with whatever salad vegetables were available and cold fish, rabbit, goat or chicken left over from the previous evening. Today we ate rabbit, with lettuce, tomato, cucumber and avocado. There was a dressing of olive oil, lemon and crushed basil leaves. I scarcely tasted any of it.